Bush, Mark

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Research & Project Interests

Successful conservation of tropical biodiversity requires that we understand the mechanisms controlling habitat and species distributions. Two potent forces induce changes in these distributions: climate change and human activities. My research uses paleoecology to understand the changing patterns of tropical biodiversity. Through the study of fossil pollen, diatoms and charcoal, we reconstruct the history of habitats in tropical South America. These paleoecological records allow us to reconstruct climate change over the last 200,000 years and relate it to patterns of biodiversity, speciation and human occupation. From these observations, we contribute to the current debate on global climate change and species conservation.

To gain these data, we must locate and visit ancient lakes in the neotropics. The lake sediments hold a history of the surrounding landscape since the formation of the lake. A core of those sediments provides us with a complete history of that location. We raise the cores using a backpackable coring rig. As many of these lakes lie in some of the most remote locations on Earth, the ?eldwork is arduous and not for the faint-hearted. Although the coring is an important and exciting facet of our work, the great majority of our time is spent in intensive lab work counting and identifying the fossil pollen and statistically analyzing the resultant data.

Our study sites include Guatemala, Amazonia, the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands. Although spanning a large geographic area, the linking theme is in trying to understand how climatic events, such as El NiÃ±o-Southern Oscillation, and mega-droughts in?uenced natural and human communities. Our study of Lake Titicaca has provided a 340,000 year (four glacial cycles) record of climate changes and shows how changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun caused changes in climate. Our studies reveal that modern temperature change is happening 10–100 times faster than any parallel event of the last 50,000 years. These data raise serious questions about the ability of species to migrate to counteract current and future climatic change. Studies of younger lakes have provided the earliest documented corn cultivation in Amazonia, evidence of a sequence of megadroughts within the last 11,000 years, and the collapse of native societies at the time of European contact.

I have published two books Ecology of a Changing Planet, which provides an introduction for undergraduates to applied ecology, and Tropical Rainforest Responses to Climatic Change aimed at a more specialized readership.

For more information go to http://research.fit.edu/paleolab/

Keywords

ProfessorBiological Sciences

My research group specializes in solving biogeographical problems via palynology - the study of pollen. Much of our work is either to improve our ability to recognize pollen or in interpreting pollen signatures of the past. Pollen can used to quantify past climate change, identify changes in landuse and cultural changes such as switches in food resources. Our work centers on the Neotropics with field sites ranging from Mexico to the Galapagos and the Amazon Basin.

Personal Overview

Mark Bush (Ph.D. Univeristy Hull, UK, 1986) is Professor and Chair of the Conservation Biology and Ecology Program at the Florida Institute of Technology. He has more than 30 years experience of working on the biogeography and paleoecology of tropical systems. His research focuses on fossil pollen and charcoal analysis of Neotropical settings and environmental reconstructions of past climates, fire histories, and vegetation communities. He also investigates pre-Columbian influences on the environment and responses to past climate change. He has published >150 papers on tropical ecology and climate change, and 2 books.

Educational Background

B.Sc. University of Hull, U.K.M.S. Duke UniversityPh.D. University of Hull, U.K.

Current Research

We use paleoecology to look at all aspects of South and Central American ecology in the Quaternary Period. Our current projects include investigating the population collapse of the Pleistocene megafauna, and the impacts of megadroughts played in the ecology of Amazonia. We are looking at climatic variability during the last interglacial and the last ice age in Central America, the Amazon Basin and the Andes. We are also engaged in investigations of the influence of the El Nino Southern Oscillation on the climate history of the Galapagos Islands. We are investigating the role that native South and Central American people played in altering their environment prior to European arrival. Lastly, we are building a bigger and better pollen database to provide a tool to improve identification of Neotropical pollen types.

Piperno, D. R., C. McMichael, and M. B. Bush. 2015. Amazonia and the Anthropocene: What was the spatial extent and intensity of human landscape modification in the Amazon Basin at the end of prehistory? The Holocene: 0959683615588374.